A STROKE caused by the stress of running a football club once robbed Raith Rovers chairman Turnbull Hutton of his speech and left him partially paralysed.

A sense of injustice over what the game’s ruling bodies were planning to do with Rangers’ newco last summer made the Stark's Park chief risk his health again by becoming the most outspoken man in Scottish football.

And he and his family, along with the Fife side, paid for the consequences of Turnbull speaking his mind.

There were threats from west Belfast about what might happen unless an objection to Rangers being parachuted into the First Division was dropped.

Fife Constabulary insisted on overnight patrols of Stark’s Park after anonymous messages said the ground would be torched.

And the chairman was rumoured to be in danger of being charged with bringing the game into disrepute for claiming the SPL and SFA were threatening to blackmail and frighten clubs who didn’t adhere to their plans.

It would be hard to imagine a less rebellious and argumentative type than the 67-year-old former whisky trade executive who sat opposite me in a Glasgow hotel and relived the trauma he refers to as the “Rangers meltdown”.

Tomorrow when Celtic travel to Raith Rovers in the Scottish Cup, the chairman’s team will inherit a windfall he says is fate smiling on them.

Turnbull said: “We suffered collateral damage when Ally McCoist demanded to know who the people were on the judiciary panel that imposed a transfer embargo and fined them £160,000.

“Eric Drysdale, one of Raith’s directors, was part of the panel and found himself in a situation where he couldn’t even leave his house for security reasons.

“He was hung out to dry and neither he nor the club received sufficient support from the SFA at that time.

“That’s when the calls and e-mails started to come in from west Belfast and the board had to pay for patrols at our ground following threats of fire raising.

“At that time I made it clear to David Longmuir, the chief executive of the SFL, that parachuting Rangers into the First Division might have been a neat solution but it wasn’t acceptable to us as a club.

“I told him we might be seen as a diddy team but weren’t going to be messed about.

“If Rangers had gone into meltdown 25 years earlier I might not have said that but at my age you tell it like it is. I wasn’t looking for a high profile and certainly had no allegiance to either half of the Old Firm. I came from a household where a defeat for Celtic or Rangers was a good result for Scottish football.

“But the bottom line was that Raith and the chairman had been instrumental in landing Rangers in the Third Division.”

Hutton’s wife feared for his health and the only humour possible to find in the middle of a frenzy of publicity was his son, a newspaper worker in Edinburgh, describing his dad as a “media whore”.

Turnbull pursued the only personal agenda he had which was to highlight the fact he felt the SFA and the SPL made glaring mistakes over due process when seeking a solution to the Gers problem.

He added: “Clubs were being told SPL2 was a possibility and if they didn’t support Rangers being moved into the second tier they wouldn’t be invited to join the new set-up. It was said out loud at meetings I attended and I resented that.

“But they never did charge me with bringing the game into disrepute. Was that because the authorities knew there was truth in what I was saying?

“I’ve met Stewart Regan and Neil Doncaster privately since and they’ve admitted mistakes were made on an issue that at one time would never have been a believable scenario.

“But out of that episode has come the catalyst for league reconstruction and a realisation we need to look forward, not back. After civil war we’re now working on a solution for all senior clubs.”

Hutton objected to being told Raith were an irrelevance because he knew what he was putting into the game.

The chairman added: “I’ve invested more than a quarter of a million pounds in Rovers and more besides in loans. But I was being lectured on what I should and shouldn’t do by people taking huge salaries out of the game.

“I left the board when I had my stroke and only went back because it was easier to protect my cash from inside the boardroom.

“A big stakeholding and a diminishing fortune led me to suffer a stroke that took away some of my speech. That’s what happens when you attend board meetings with your cheque book open to pay players’ wages.

“That’s the reality of life as a wee diddy team. And that’s why playing Celtic this weekend has restored my faith in God.”

The game kicks off at lunchtime and is a historical landmark, being the first live TV match from Stark’s Park.

Rovers will receive £82,500, taking the club’s earnings from the day to £140,000.

Or, as the chairman knows it, three months wages paid for without him or any of his fellow directors having to drain cash from their personal resources to meet playing staff costs.

“We were 2-1 down to Airdrie in the Scottish Cup a few weeks ago and my fellow directors sat heads in hands worrying about the consequences of defeat. Then Greg Spence equalised and we won the replay.

“A late goal got us past Deveronvale in the next round when the board were worrying about having to pay for a bus and meals for the replay in Banff.

“And now we’ve got Celtic. Cash flow is taken care of for the next three months and we haven’t ripped anybody off in the process.

“We had Celtic in the League Cup in Glasgow earlier in the season and we’ve got them in the Scottish Cup. All I can say is, ‘Wow, what a break for Rovers’.

“I still wish Ally hadn’t said what he did. I wish that when Rangers chairman Malcolm Murray issued his club’s apology for disrupting Scottish football he’d mentioned Ally’s mistake.

“It would’ve been easier if I’d kept my mouth shut but I said what I believed to be right. None of that should be muddled by the passage of time.”